Even W. H. Smith, president of the Nicodemus colony, saw Niles’s efforts to obtain support and resources for the settlement as unauthorized, dishonest, and self-serving. Always seeming to try to outrun any deterioration in his reputation, Niles left Nicodemus shortly after his exoneration in the “corn trial” and moved to Phillips County, Arkansas.
Niles’s idea of a land reparations program for all Blacks seems to have taken seed in Nicodemus. However, it came to fruition in Arkansas, where Niles formed the Indemnity Party, an all-Black political party seeking reparations and providing an alternative to the Republican Party for Black voters in the state. The charge immediately was made that any diversion of the Black vote from the Republican Party would give the more explicitly white supremacist Democratic Party a greater opportunity for electoral success. This parallels the contemporary claim—given the post-Dixiecrat reversal of the postures of the two major parties—that any withdrawal of Black votes from the Democratic Party in search of a specific “Black agenda” only will give the now overtly racist Republican Party an additional critical leg up in national politics.
Not only were local whites discontented about Niles’s political activity, they also were disturbed by his alleged involvement in additional scams. But it was the formation and promotion of the Indemnity Party that seemed to draw the greatest ire.
Many people schemed to bring Niles down because of his political activities. In 1882 Niles owned a store in Lee County, Arkansas, where he sold whiskey without a license. Initially he was arrested and convicted on multiple charges of violating state law and ordered to pay $1,200 in fines. But the Black community rose in his support, and after he spent a few days in jail, it raised the full amount and paid off his fine. However, he was rearrested immediately for violating federal laws by selling liquor without a license. This time, despite a renewed outcry from the Black community, he was convicted again and ordered to pay $400 and spend four months in state prison.
At the end of his sentence, Niles left Arkansas for Washington, D.C., and proceeded to actively promote the Indemnity Party’s project. Niles sought to obtain public land where Blacks could live separately and independently of whites. It would constitute a space for Black settlement of six thousand square miles or almost 4 million acres.
Niles advanced this proposal in the latter half of 1883, and by early October he was making the case in writing to the president and the Department of Justice. He also indicated that an all-Black political party could come together and possibly nominate Frederick Douglass as its presidential candidate. Niles argued that it was necessary to “declare war against the Republican Party” for its failure to fulfill its promises for two decades.
The climate for the Indemnity Party’s plan was not propitious. Respectable voices in the Black community were hostile. On October 15, 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, an act that had prohibited discrimination in access to hotels, trains, and other public sites. On November 3, 1883, the Danville (Virginia) Massacre resulted in massive loss of Black lives and destruction of Black property. The massacre was followed by the November 6, 1883, election, when Virginia senator William Mahone and the Readjuster Party lost control of the state to the Democratic Party.
Ultimately, it was America’s officialdom who shut down Niles’s project. Attorney General Benjamin Harris Brewster deflected the Indemnity Party’s petition in two steps. First, he invoked a states’ rights argument that the territory sought was under the jurisdiction of the state of Arkansas and beyond the approval of the federal government for Black settlement. Second, Brewster said if satisfaction was not forthcoming from the state of Arkansas, Niles ultimately could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court—the same Court that just had struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
With Kansas senator John James Ingalls’s successful motion to table the Indemnity Party’s petition for homesteads for Black Americans on the floor of Congress, this chapter of the Black reparations movement came to an end. Subsequent claims for reparations consistently have been met by resistance from elite Blacks and by concerted efforts to discredit advocates. Unfortunately, Niles’s personal history had given his opponents plenty of ammunition, but implementation of his core idea—provision of land grants for the formerly enslaved—would have forever altered the trajectory of America’s racial and economic history.
1884–1889
PHILADELPHIA
Kali Nicole Gross
When Christopher J. Perry launched the Philadelphia Tribune on November 28, 1884, he had no way of knowing that it would become the longest-running independent Black newspaper in the nation. Yet he was confident in the future success of the Tribune because it was unabashedly written by Black people for Black people. Or as Perry described it, the Tribune’s purpose was to “lead the masses to appreciate their best interests and to suggest the best means for attaining deserved ends.” The clear imperative and sense of urgency are evident in his words. With good reason, too.
Between 1870 and 1890, Philadelphia’s African American community nearly doubled in size. This steady stream of Black migrants sparked white fears of rising urban crime. Police officers profiled African Americans using surveillance methods that a decade later would be codified into official policing practices. Patrolmen were directed to report on and detain all those who appeared to be poor or loiterers from outside the state. Such tactics found Black people especially vulnerable in a city that already had a long history of disproportionately incarcerating them. Philadelphia was home to the country’s first penitentiary, the Walnut Street Jail, founded in 1790, in anticipation of Black freedom after Pennsylvania passed one of the earliest acts of gradual abolition in 1780.
Building on a legacy of biased justice, police officers in Perry’s time employed a muscular surveillance of suspected members of the “crime class.” Between 1884 and 1887, the force had a clarified administrative hierarchy and a detective squad overseen by a former Secret Service operative. Coercion in custody was routine, as police beating prisoners was, for the most part, tolerated as a part of the job. Most African Americans arrested by Philadelphia police and sentenced by its justice system were charged with crimes against property. But in 1885, one recent Black migrant to the city would be arrested for murder.
The majority of the migrants hailed from Virginia and Maryland, but smaller numbers of African Americans came from New England. Such was the case with Annie E. Cutler, a twenty-one-year-old Black woman who lived and worked in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love. Laboring as a cook, Annie had a solid job at a saloon at 835 Race Street. Perhaps because of her schooling and pedigree (she had had eight years of private education in her hometown of Newport, Rhode Island), Annie enjoyed an amicable relationship with her white employers, the Mettlers. She also maintained a close, intimate relationship with the man she expected to wed, William H. Knight. The two had been dating for years. She had followed him from Newport to Philadelphia, after falling in love with him in the summer of 1882.